North Essex Opportunity Website – wtf?

It will take some beating to come up with a website with more corporate bullshit than the North Essex Opportunity effort that has surfaced.

Basically it’s a shop front for pipe dreams.

It boasts of aspirations for the area without facts.

The dream that it is selling sounds more like a nightmare for existing residents.

A cabal of local councils and Third Way dreamers are behind the North Essex Opportunity project. They include Colchester Borough Council, whose name is strangely missing from the list of contacts.

A quick whois search returns a response of REDACTED for the owner of the website.

Fancy that.

The premise is to SHOUT about how bloody good it would be to move your business to a growing ‘corridor’ that now stretches from Cambridge out towards the Sunshine Coast and Clacton.

Stop it.

For corridors we prefer to read communities; and not the bloody garden type ones, either.

Speaking of which, how is this for a chest beating boast:

“With 58,000 new homes, 58,000 new jobs, five distinct and highly desirable new garden communities and more than £3.65 billion of planned spending, we are set to be propelled to become an economic powerhouse.”

MAJOR PMSL etc.

Those 58,000 new homes are but a wet dream for the officially ‘unsound’ North Essex Garden Communities Ltd.

Likewise the fictional 58,000 new jobs – something that the nice government Inspector failed to see any evidence of in his highly critical letter last summer.

The planned spending of £3.65 billion is just that – planned, with no firm guarantees of money in the pot.

The Chronic plans to spend £1M over the next six months on a new sales team…

And hang on.

When did the idea of a 40,000 bloody garden village project grow to become 58,000?

“The population of North Essex is growing, and is predicted to rise by 190,000 by 2050.”

Cheers for that.

How will these new people living in our corridor get around?

“The creation of new homes across North Essex will see an estimated £2 billion of new infrastructure to support the five proposed garden communities.”

You try telling the nice government Inspector that. This was something else he failed to find any evidence of.

Dig a little deeper around the corporate crap and you find that our patch is described as:

“An innovative and growing multi-sector.”

aka as home.

It’s only marginally better than the ‘convenient base’ tag that CBC tried to spin us with last week.